What do you say to someone who has done you the service of exposing fake news, and given you a more realistic perspective? A thank you and a hug would be a good start. With propaganda, trickery with camera angles and bare-faced lies all over different media platforms these days, these guardians of fact and truth should be lauded for the heroes that they are.

But what happens when the truth-tellers go rogue? Everyone loves a good conspiracy, so when a shocking photo of flames blazing in front of the iconic Arc de Triomphe emerged, juxtaposed with a small scooter set alight with photographers jostling for angles in the background, it immediately went viral.

“Aha!” People cried. “It’s the media at it again, tricking us into believing that Paris is burning! Those rascals!”

This time, however, it was the debunkers that needed debunking. Nobody knows who first created the comparison and why, but it was shared tens of thousands of times, along with sarcastic captions like “Perspective matters” or “Paris Burns.” International news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) decided to step in and investigate, and what they found was interesting indeed.

“Perspective matters, and so do dates and places… because these two photos were taken on two different days in two different places, in Paris,” they wrote on Twitter. “Criticism of media coverage is legitimate, but this isn’t the best example of it.

The entire thread is an expert dismantling of this ‘exposé,’ and is a timely reminder that even those claiming to be working on behalf of ‘the truth’ need to be fact-checked themselves.

These pictures ‘debunking’ fires at the Paris Protests have gone viral over the past few days

But something seemed off to international news agency AFP, so they decided to investigate

And what they found proved that even those claiming to be working on behalf of ‘the truth’ need to be fact-checked themselves